Stalking the Night
by csyphrett
Summary: Kolchak has dealt with a lot of monsters over the years, and now he has to face a new breed from the menace of the 113


Stalking the Night

1

Woolsy Gwynne raised his arm. He smiled quietly. He brought the arm down. A whip cracked the air as it struck the prisoner's back. The man didn't have the strength to scream at the slicing of his skin.

Gwynne pulled his whip back. He should be asking questions to give answers to his employer. Instead he stepped three feet to the left so he could start working on the other side of the man's back.

By the time he was done, the prisoner would be dead. He would tell the prince that he couldn't get the man to crack before he died.

Gwynne doubted the prisoner knew anything anyway. Who told an underling anything?

It was better to practice his skill on this man so the next one would be that much easier to crack if he wanted to crack the man. That would make him more useful to his leader. Then he would be called in to deal with any enemy prisoner that was captured.

He cracked the whip against the unmarked part of the back of the prisoner. The man didn't bother to cry out under the pain. He was too weak after the treatment he had received.

The lock rattled in the door. The hinges creaked as three men stepped inside the cell. Two were ordinary soldiers in mail and tabards marked with the royal arms. The third was the prince. He frowned at the prisoner as he took a spot near the brazier full of hot metal implements.

"What have you learned, Master Gwynne?" The prince inspected the tongs glowing in the brazier.

"He has refused to speak, your highness." Gwynne stepped back from the lashed body. "I am sure with more time I can get something from him."

"I doubt it." The prince frowned at his minion. "He should be telling us everything he knows by now, perhaps even imagining things for us to know. Instead he has remained silent this whole time."

Gwynne tried to think of something to say to dispute the prince's judgement, but couldn't. The implication that his overlord had waited outside the whole time he had been using the lash and had not heard him ask any questions was disastrous.

The prince moved toward the prisoner to inspect the wounds inflicted on his body. His guards moved to make sure the torturer couldn't attack the prince, or run away.

He could leave when the word was given.

"This is interesting." The prince used a piece of cloth to open the prisoner's mouth. "Did you happen to notice this, Master Gwynne?"

"Notice what, your highness?" Gwynne thought he could take one of the bodyguards with his whip before the other could draw his sword. He wasn't quite sure which one had the faster reflexes.

"Come here." The prince waved his free hand for his employee to approach. The guards provided a channel, hands on their weapons. "You might find this useful to know."

Gwynne walked toward the prisoner. He tried to maintain a calm outward appearance. People who failed the prince didn't last too long.

He had a feeling he was about to fall in that minority of people. How could he redeem himself in the face of a lethal punishment?

He enjoyed torturing others, but not when it was applied to him.

The prince opened the man's mouth again. He gestured for a lit torch from the wall. He took it from the guard and placed the light next to the prisoner's head.

"What do you see?" The prince motioned for Gwynne to step closer and have a look in the man's mouth.

The torturer squinted for a moment. The torch's dancing light made things harder to discern, but he realized what the prince meant after he saw what was missing.

"This man has no tongue." Gwynne stepped back.

"So he won't be giving us any answers, will he?" The prince handed the torch back to his guard. "It explains why he didn't say anything to save himself. I assume you didn't check his mouth to make sure he could talk."

"No, I didn't." He realized the prince had known that the prisoner couldn't talk. This had all been a test to see what he would do. He had the feeling he had failed the test badly.

"That seems to be the first thing you should have made sure of, don't you think?" The prince smiled. "You have served the family for a long time, but perhaps you are losing your touch. I was thinking that you should try your hand at something else."

Gwynne opened his mouth to protest. He stopped himself with the thought that he was on the edge of being whipped himself, or subjected to something more horrible. It was better to agree and leave before the prince withdrew any thought of mercy.

"That will be most generous of you, Your Highness." He bowed from the waist, and presented the whip to his overlord.

The prince took the whip with a nod. He folded it together to tuck under his arm.

"Please escort Master Gwynne to his quarters and then to the stable where he can get a horse to take him where he wants to go." The prince waved a hand in a hurry up gesture. "As soon as you're done, take this man back to the dungeon until I decide what to do with him."

The guards saluted before falling in on either side of Gwynne and walking him from the cell. They took him from the torture chamber, up into the central courtyard, and toward the main gate of the wall that separated the keep from the village that surrounded the castle. They maintained bored expressions as if they had walked former employees from the castle many times before.

"My apartment is just off the gate." Gwynne pointed at the door in the wall. His place was close to the quarters maintained by the castle's defenders.

"We're going to an inn first." One of the guards spoke. "Seeing you off will buy us enough time to get a tankard and some cooking without problems from his nibs, or the captain of the watch."

"I see." The torturer nodded. "Thank you for the escort."

"It's our pleasure." The guard smiled. "You don't know how many hours of the day we have to wait around before we get something to do. We always have to be on guard so we don't get the chop if the prince doesn't like our uniforms, or how we're standing."

"I can see where that would be problem." Gwynne knew ten minutes wasn't a long time, but he had just undergone the same problem as his escort for however briefly it had been.

"We're going to take the bridge here, Master Gwynne." He pointed at the wooden span to his right. "The inn is on the other side."

The guards escorted Gwynne to the center of the bridge. The talkative one kept up a running commentary about everything he had seen in the castle since he had come on duty. The other remained silent, watching the sides for anyone who might rush them.

Gwynne started to turn to the talkative one to ask him what was going on. Pain flared in his back. He felt fire run up his spine as blood turned his tunic sticky.

"Sorry." The guard shrugged. "Orders are orders."

The silent guard cut Gwynne's throat. They grabbed him and threw him off the bridge into the river. He sank out of sight as the current grabbed him and carried him downstream.

"Too bad for the poor sod." The guard shrugged at his companion. "But at least it wasn't us."

The other guard grunted in agreement.

"Let's get some ale and then head back to deal with Tongueless Johnny." They walked off the bridge toward their destination.

It would be good to get something to drink and eat before having to deal with the prisoner. He would be sent down the river in the same way as Gwynne. They expected less effort in getting rid of a man almost dead compared to one who was still able to run away.

The prince would smile at a job well done and then go on making plans to get rid of his other enemies and failures. They would be right there to help him with swords in hand.

They knew the risks of serving His Highness, but considered the man well mannered and quick to reward loyal service.

He was also quick to punish those who tried to make a fool of him. That was something the guards kept in mind as they quickly ate some lamb and bread and drank one tankard each before returning to the castle to get rid of the silenced prisoner.

2

They found Warren Moon sliced to pieces in an alley just off River Drive. Cops set up a cordon to keep people out as their CSIs and Medical Examiners Office people tried to put Moon together enough to load in a bag to carry downtown to the morgue.

Carl Kolchak stood outside the yellow tape, trying to take pictures with his old camera that he had never upgraded because of the money. He frowned at the activity as he moved around to try to get better shots.

He covered the crime beat in Chicago for the INS wire service. A death like this set his hair standing on end. This was going to be one of the weird ones. He knew it from the way the cops looked at the victim.

When you saw a veteran patrolman screw his face up at the thought of putting a body in a bag, you knew it was going to be worse than usual.

And Kolchak had dealt with some of the worse crimes that had come along in Chicago the last decade or so.

He grimaced. He seemed to attract every vampire and Ripper imitator within the tri-state area.

"Hey, Petrowski!" Kolchak let his camera hang down on its strap from his shoulder. He doubted he could get a clearer picture with his terrible photo taking skills. "Any I.D. on the body?"

"The detectives will have a statement." Petrowski gave the reporter a bored look. "This isn't your first murder, Kolchak."

Truer words had never been spoken. He knew most of the homicide detectives on the force. None of them wanted him to get a scoop. They all acted as if he were some kind of living poison.

He had ended some of their careers, but that been incidental to some of the things that had happened during their investigations. Some of the problems had been caused by the government covering up secrets. He still couldn't remember what had happened to the robot that escaped and decided to go on a rampage.

He only had his tape as evidence that anything had happened at all. The police had been told to shut up and not to talk to him about when he tried to verify the events for the wire service.

He supposed he should be glad they hadn't arranged an accident for him when he went back to the institute. Naturally they had denied everything.

It wasn't the first time one of his stories had been denied and ordered to cease to exist.

This dead body in a random alley was looking like the same type of story.

He was still going to research it, and run it down. There was a slim chance that this could be an ordinary serial killer on the loose, or a mob hit gone horribly wrong. The public deserved to know the truth whatever that was.

And it was his job to tell them the truth despite people trying to shut him up.

The first thing he needed was a name so he could start running background for his story to put it on the wire. He wasn't going to get that from the patrolmen guarding the scene. They wouldn't know, and wouldn't tell him.

He needed to talk to a detective handling the case. They could give him something to run.

"What are you doing here, Kolchak?" Sergeant Joe Nicholls walked up, placing his hands in his pockets as he regarded the scene, the technicians, and the reporter in his off-white suit and straw hat. "You know the policy. Reporters will be given an official statement from the Press Squad."

"What are your thoughts, Nicholls?" Kolchak held up his tape recorder. "As an ace detective with over forty felony arrests, what could have happened to the victim to reduce him to such a state?"

"Got no idea." Nicholls shrugged. "I'm just getting started. The M.E. will have to look things over before they declare it a murder, which they will from the looks of things. I will have to notify the family if there is any, and then start reconstructing his last forty eight hours. You know how things work."

"No chance of an accident?" Kolchak watched the detective's face. Nicholls had a block on the top of his neck, emphasized by his crewcut.

"It could be." The sergeant shrugged again. "But I doubt it. If it was, this becomes a body dumping which is still a crime. Either way, I'll have to figure out what happened and sort things out."

"Do you know who the dead man is yet?" Kolchak hoped to get that ahead of his fellow hounds so he could get started on his story.

"Nope." Nicholls waved him off. "When I do, I'll have the Press Squad release it to you guys as soon as possible."

Kolchak frowned. The release would have nothing in it except the man/woman's name and age. Everything about the murder would be held back.

Kolchak cut off the recorder and let it drop by his side.

"Isn't there anything you can give me?" He stepped back as orderlies rolled the body by on a gurney. The lumps in the rubber bag didn't resemble anything human.

"Sorry, you're a suspect at the moment." Nicholls smiled at him.

"How can I be a suspect?" Kolchak indicated the rubber bag as it was loaded in a transport van.

"Everyone is until we rule them out." Nicholls turned to cross the yellow line. "Don't leave town, you fiend."

"Very funny." Kolchak shook his head as he decided to follow the body. Maybe someone at the morgue could help him out. He used to have a couple of contacts inside the M.E. office. Maybe they could give him something useful to chase down.

He jogged over to his battered Mustang and started the engine. When the morgue van pulled away, he got behind it. He needed to call Tony and tell him he had a live one. He would still need to turn in copy by the deadline.

Once he knew the victim's name, and how he had died, he could start his article. Just reporting a random body found in a Chicago alley meant nothing. Bodies were found in Chicago alleys all the time. Most didn't have the extra something that made them a Kolchak Special.

A Kolchak Special had holes in the neck with no blood, or seventy years passing overnight, or being ripped apart and partially eaten. Maybe even a deal with the devil applied.

A guy gunned down, knifed, or beaten with his wallet gone didn't qualify as a Special unless something else applied to the crime.

And he hadn't seen anything like that at the scene while the techs worked.

He drove through the city, thinking about what he knew, trying to frame his story. He only had three basic facts so far. None of them seemed useful.

The van pulled up to the loading dock preferred by the morgue people. They wouldn't have to carry the body through the building to the storage refrigerator. Kolchak had been forced to stop in the public parking lot.

He got out and scurried around to the door as the attendants rolled the corpse into the building. He hurried to catch the door before it closed. They had number locks on the doors now, and he couldn't wrangle a code to get in on his own.

No one trusted him not to look through autopsy files and not print what he found.

He grudgingly admitted to himself that he would do that if he had a story big enough.

He stepped in the cool hall and followed the men rolling their burden to its temporary home. He tried to act like he belonged, but he needed a lab coat to really sell it. At least the orderlies didn't seem to care. Maybe coming through the locked door had fooled them into thinking he should be there.

If anyone else saw him, he would be ejected. His dealings with the Medical Examiners were just as raucous as with the police. Neither group liked him.

Of course, uncovering a body parts ring inside the medical examiners and showing people evidence might not have won him friends.

No one liked ghouls eating their dead relatives.

None of his contacts were on duty. And if they were, they hadn't seen the body yet. So he had to see the body for himself before he could ask them their opinions about what had happened.

Whatever the report said, it would be in an official language that would minimize what he had seen the techs and orderlies doing in the alley.

He had followed too many cases where the report had said strangulation which was the official word for a bruiser grabbing a victim by the neck with both hands and choking them until they died.

He followed the gurney past an empty office. He peered inside and found a labcoat on a coat rack next to the door. He yanked it down off its hook and pulled it on over his battered suit and equipment. He hid his hat under the coat.

It was a rough disguise that wouldn't survive a challenge, but it should be okay for the few minutes he needed it.

He stepped back in the hall and followed the sound of the gurney down the hall until he came across a do not enter sign that he was sure didn't apply to him and stepped in the morgue area.

The bag still lay on the rolling bed. Neither of the orderlies were in attendance. They could be back any second. He scurried over to the bag and unzipped it. He stepped back but regained control of himself.

The body had been sliced apart in sections. The analogy that popped in his head was like a giant tomato slicer. You put the tomato in between the stack of blades and the pusher, then you closed the pusher and the tomato came out the other side of the blades in a stack of round pieces.

He closed the bag and put that fact down as something to include in his story. How many people were turned into human tomatoes?

Kolchak dropped the coat on the writing desk used to check in the bodies after making sure there was nothing with a name for the body laying around. He headed for the door.

This had all the makings of a Special. How could he sell Tony on printing it. He doubted that the method of murder would be disclosed until the killer was caught.

What sliced a man up like that until he was a stack of chopped rings?

He had to know. It was his fatal flaw. He had to know what really happened, and he had to let other people know what had happened.

One day it would get him killed by something men weren't meant to know, but until it did, he had to keep finding out the truth.

He jogged back to his Mustang, glad to have escaped the morgue before being caught for once. He had to get to the office and write what he had up for the wire, then he had to find Nicholls and keep digging for identification and the last hours of the victim.

He had to find the monster and stop him if he could.

3

Kolchak settled into his chair at the briefing. The body hadn't made a blip on anyone else's radar yet. He had asked around the neighborhood after the police had gone. A stone wall had stalled his efforts in that direction.

His only hope was the Press flack would give him a name during the briefing so he could dig deeper.

So far, he had nothing to show for his efforts.

It didn't help that a body showing up in Chicago was as common as crooked politicians.

Sergeant Randy Crackle walked up to the podium with a sheaf of papers. What he had in his hands could make or break any one of their stories. He smiled at them with his round face as he checked his notes with cloudy eyes behind thick glasses. Most of what he had to say would be no comment, and he knew it.

The trick would be to make him step away from that stance and give up something useful.

"I thought we said you weren't allowed at these briefings any more, Kolchak." Crackle singled him out among the group sitting in front of the podium.

"I thought you were going to be a real policeman one day, Randy." Kolchak said without thinking. "What have you got on a murder that happened last night? Body was dumped in an alley close to the Lake."

"Don't have anything like that here, Kolchak." Crackle smiled at him.

"Nicholls is investigating it." Kolchak stood. "Are you telling me you don't have anything useful on this crime?"

"I don't even have a crime according to this." The press flack waved his notes. "Are you sure there was a crime?"

"I spoke to Nicholls at a crime scene that had been roped off. A body was removed. There had been no identification at the scene as far as I know." Kolchak grimaced. This was a Special all right. The police clammed up about any weirdness as soon as they saw it. "Did anybody happen to have a heart attack near there?"

"I do have a notice that the body of a Warren Moon had been discovered." Crackle checked the papers. "No cause of death yet. White male, age 45. We are still looking for any next of kin to notify."

"Was that so hard?" Kolchak made a note of the name and description. "Any background stuff?"

"Not yet." Crackle smiled at him.

"Thanks, Randy." Kolchak nodded and headed for the door. The rest of the briefing would be about normal crimes and police attempts to capture the culprits.

A Special might be about a crime, but normal procedures never stopped them. Only someone who was willing to chase things in the dark would find where they lived and do something about it.

The police would never do that. It would make them look bad if it came out they were chasing monsters instead of criminals.

They weren't really effective against either depending on the policeman.

He had killed a bunch of monsters since he had landed in Chicago. He could kill one more before things were done.

Kolchak wondered how many Warren Moons there were in the city. He needed to get some traction if he was going to find out what was going on.

Bodies piled up around Specials like leaves in fall. He could expect more before either he, or the police if they got lucky, identified what was making them.

He decided to hit the neighborhood again. Now that he had a name, maybe someone would open up to him.

Maybe Moon had just been dumped there. If that was the case, maybe someone had seen the dumping.

Maybe they would tell him because he wasn't the police.

He had to answer the background questions about Warren Moon before he figure out anything about the killer. Nicholls had deliberately withheld a lot of the pertinent information so he could investigate ahead of reporters working the story. That's why there was no emphasis on the cause of death.

No cop who wanted to keep working would report their victim had been cut up into slices like a loaf of bread.

If he hadn't seen the body, and the other things in his career, Kolchak wouldn't have believed that himself.

No normal killer did things like that.

He had met his fair share of those too in his long career.

Usually they shot you and left you to bleed out on the street, or decided to take you on a ride somewhere they could bury your body in peace and quiet, or dropped you in a large body of water with a weight around you.

Slicing you up into rings was a bit much in his experience.

He supposed if one of the wise guys got ticked enough, they would do that as an object lesson to others.

Cross us again, and we'll cut you into tiny pieces.

Kolchak parked his mustang where he had parked it the night before. He hopped over the door and looked the neighborhood over again. It looked differently in the daytime.

He had made his own enquiries, but no one had anything to say to him. They had seen nothing and heard nothing. He had left some of his cards with the potential witnesses in case they decided they wanted to be famous.

This time he had to go over the scene more carefully and see if there was something the technicians and himself had missed during the night. The various night crews had gone home by now. The day people wouldn't be able to tell him anything.

He walked down to where the body had been gathered up. The guy who had found it was homeless according to the radio scanner. The police had arrived to cordon off the area. Kolchak had parked his car at the curb soon after that.

Kolchak looked at the wall around where the body had lain according to his estimates. He frowned at slices in the brick. He turned and found some matching marks on the other side of the alley. He noted blood spray next to the slices.

He pulled his recorder up and spoke into it about his observations. He didn't want to forget.

He also didn't like what his observations told him happen.

Moon was killed in the alley by something whipping around inside the confined space.

It didn't seem possible, but he suspected that was the case with this killer.

He looked up and down the alley. He pulled his recorder up and closed his eyes to get his thoughts in order. Then he asked himself a series of questions. When he was done, he cut the recorder off.

He had two essential facts he could build his story on at the moment.

The first was the killer looked human like a vampire, or a ripper. It had to look human to lure Moon into the alley. Then it had taken him apart with something that might have been tentacles of some kind from the marks on the wall.

The second was the odd way of killing would make the monster easy to identify if he could find the right book to look into in the next few days.

The problem was that it would be out there slicing people apart while he and the police plodded behind it, trying to identify its lair and how to kill it without being killed.

Kolchak paused when he reached the end of the alley away from his car. He and the police had arrived from the other end. This end had a different set of cars parked around it, except one.

Who owned a BMW in that neighborhood?

He walked around the car, checking the others in the street. It stood out like a sore thumb. Did Nicholls know the car was there at the murder scene?

Kolchak tried the doors and found the driver's side to be open. He sat down and checked the glove box. He found a bunch of letters, credit card bills, business cards, and the registration.

Now he knew where Moon lived.

He smiled. Then he put everything back. The murderer might have driven this car and he had touched things that the murderer had touched.

He had to get out of there before a cop found him sitting there. They might try to get him for interfering in an investigation.

He got out of the car and shut it up. He looked up and down the street. He needed to turn the car over to the cops so they could rule out all the humans that had come into contact with Moon.

He also had an office to check out. The cops would have gone over it, but they were looking for a regular killer despite what they had seen with their own eyes. He was looking for an intelligent predator that was capable of luring a man to his death before dropping the axe.

Moon sold alarm and security systems for a living according to his card. What would he have to set up in the neighborhood where he died?

Kolchak walked down to a convenience store with a pay phone. He dropped in some change and called the Homicide squad room. He told the detective who answered that he had found Moon's car and where it was. He hung up without answering any questions.

He walked back to his mustang. He had a home and office to look over. The cops had beat him to it, but maybe he could turn something up. He had enough for a start to his story.

He recorded the idea that Moon might have been working on an alarm system in one of the buildings before he had been killed.

Maybe the killer was a buyer, or someone posing as a buyer. The police would be all over that.

What were his options if he was wrong, and Moon had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time?

He had still driven down to a rough neighborhood in the night. A potential job made sense if he was told that it had to be done at night because the place was open in the daytime and they didn't want traffic to be disrupted.

Kolchak nodded as he drove. Everything made sense except for why Moon? Why had he been targeted? If he knew that, he knew who the killer was going to target next.

There was going to be another victim.

A Kolchak Special never stopped at one. They created chains of death and destruction until they were stopped.

He doubted a stake, or a silver bullet, would stop this one.

He drove across town to the address listed on the business card. He needed to get a feel for Moon and how he did things. Then he could use that to find his killer.

The police would be there asking their own questions. How did he get around that?

Maybe he could pose as a potential buyer. He considered the scheme as he found a place for his mustang. He stowed his camera and recorder in the trunk before he approached the cube of a building the alarm business resided in.

He opened the door and looked inside. A secretary sat at a desk in the front of the room. He walked over and held up the card as if checking to see if he was in the right place.

"How can I help you?" The secretary had a name tag that said Liz, white in her brown hair, and teeth that needed to be fixed by a dentist.

"I was hoping to talk to Mr. Moon." Kolchak held out the card. "He was going to give me some specifications for an alarm system."

"Mr. Moon won't be in today." The secretary opened up an appointment book. "Would you like to talk to someone else?"

"I'm sorry to hear that." Kolchak scanned the layout of the place as he stood there. "Is he sick?"

"I don't know." She frowned. "He hasn't come in. Would you like to talk to someone else?"

"That's all right." Kolchak smiled. "I'll come by later and see if I can talk to him then."

Maybe he would have glued himself together after a night on a slab.

4

Kolchak sat at his desk, trying to figure out his next move. His tour of the alarm company had netted nothing as far as he was concerned. No one seemed suspicious, and no one seemed to have been alerted that their co-worker had been killed in the night.

Nicholls would do that when he got around to doing his own background check. He would have the address Moon was supposed to have been working on that night with a record check with the company.

That left the reporter with nothing for the moment.

"Kolchak!" Tony Vincenzo stood in the door of his glass enclosed office. "Do you have anything?"

"I have my initial take, Tony." Kolchak took the three pages of copy he had typed up on his old manual from his out tray and stood. "I was trying to think of what else I could do to chase things down."

"Victim?" Tony took the three pages and read through them. His eyebrows went up. "Chopped up like a tomato? Really, Kolchak? Really?"

"Really, Tony." Kolchak waved his hands around to demonstrate his points as he started the rundown of the crime. "Warren Moon, alarm installer, chopped to pieces in an alley in a bad part of town. No one saw anything. According to the people I talked to, he didn't have an enemy in the world. No family, no ties."

"This is one of your weird ones, isn't it?" Vincenzo groaned. "I think they follow you around like puppies."

"No, Tony, no." Kolchak smiled. "The death was a little strange, but I am sure this is payback for some kind of crime that Moon stumbled over. Not a vampire, or werewolf, in sight."

Vincenzo had been with him in Vegas when he had run into Janos Skorzeny, and put the vampire down in his lair. That had got them kicked out of Vegas before the dust could settle from the staking.

Despite the reputation he had garnered, Vincenzo kept hiring him whenever the editor moved from one city to another. Now they were in Chicago working for the INS.

He was one of Kolchak's only true friends, and they both knew it.

And they both knew since Skorzeny, Kolchak attracted monsters wherever he went.

"Better not be." Tony glanced through the papers. "We might have to hold back the method of death until the police finish their investigation. Otherwise, it looks solid enough to put on the wire. What's the follow-up?"

"I don't know yet." Kolchak shrugged. "There's nothing to point anywhere. Right now, it's a strange death in the urban jungle. If Nicholls solves it with what he has, I will be surprised."

"Stay on it." Vincenzo nodded. "Don't forget that you have to turn in something on that club that's starting in the Loop."

"I'll go down there tonight." Kolchak made a face. The last thing he wanted to do was cover some club.

"Bring back something we can use." Vincenzo stepped into his office. "The word is some bigwigs are going to be there. See if you can dig up something on them."

"What kind of bigwigs are going to be at a club?" Kolchak shrugged. "I'll see what I can do."

Kolchak went to his desk and pulled on his jacket and hat. He made sure his recorder and camera were ready, with extra batteries for both. There was nothing so embarrassing as having your equipment fail when you needed it.

He would swing by the murder scene before swinging by the club. He had time according to his watch. And he liked to straighten out a crooked politician when he could.

They were worst bloodsuckers than vampires in his opinion.

Kolchak drove to the alley where Moon had been found on automatic pilot. There had to be something there he was missing. He knew that if he thought about it enough, it would continue to elude him. But maybe he could trick it into coming to mind with another survey.

Kolchak parked his mustang in the same spot as he had the first night. He got out of the car and looked around. He didn't bother with the alley. He just wanted to see what the neighborhood told him before he did anything else.

He was dealing with a smart murderer. He had called Moon down to the alley with some story about needing a new alarm system. That went with the bars on the windows and multiple locks that the reporter could see.

So Moon had entered the other end of the alley. Maybe the killer had told him the business was on this end. That made sense with Moon's car on the other side.

Why call him down there in the first place? Moon had nothing to recommend him as a victim.

Kolchak knew that meant little to the Specials. They killed anything that got too close to them. They didn't have to have a reason.

This one felt like it had selected Moon for something. That was what was eluding the reporter. Why had he been selected to die?

Kolchak walked down the alley, scanning the concrete and asphalt as he went. Crime scene guys might have found all there was in the alley. None of them had his experience with the things that stalked the night.

He found something that looked like a picture resting on top of the blood spatter. He took a picture of it before picking it up. The technicians must have thought it was unimportant when they went through the alley the first time.

Kolchak didn't know what to make of it himself. He pulled out an envelope and put the piece of paper in that. If it became important, it might be enough to keep him ahead of Nicholls.

If it was a Special, cops would just killed trying to stop it.

He had seen that in person when a zombie had been brought back to kill the people who was responsible for killing the gangster involved in the first place.

And the command staff didn't seem that flexible when things hinted at a suspect being a little more than natural.

Kolchak finished his walk. He noted that Moon's car was gone. Either the cops had picked it up, or the local thieves. It wasn't his problem any more.

He walked back to his car. He took one more look at the crime scene before getting behind the wheel. Someone would wash the blood off in a few days. You wouldn't even know that someone had been killed.

The reporter decided to hit the club. He could turn in a few hundred words about the place before he tried to figure out what the paper meant. Dropped on top of the spray meant that the murder came first. The blood on it was gummy which meant it had stayed there during the examination of the scene.

Which one of them had dropped it?

Hopefully, the murderer.

Kolchak found a parking spot for his car and looked at the club down the street. A line of people stood at the door. He frowned at the suits and dresses. He looked down at his own ragged ensemble.

He would never be a mover and shaker.

Kolchak got out of his car and shouldered his recorder and camera. He headed for the front of the club. Maybe he could get by the bouncers. He doubted it, but it was better than breaking in the back door.

He paused at the square building. A small sign that said Royal Tennis Club had been bolted on the side of the door. A large man in sweats kept people from the door until someone came out.

All this for an exercise club didn't make sense. The hair on Kolchak's neck told him that he was looking at some kind of front. He decided that if he couldn't get in, maybe he should talk to the bouncer.

"How's it going?" Kolchak pulled out his press card. "Kolchak, INS. Do you have the time to talk to me?"

"No." The bouncer waved another couple in. "The owner doesn't like us slacking off."

"Would it be all right if I go in and talk to someone else?" The reporter took a picture of the bouncer.

"They'll have you thrown out." The bouncer shook his head. "The boss doesn't want any problem people inside. Reporters as a class fit that. You might want to clear out before someone calls the cops on you."

"I got it." Kolchak looked at the door one more time. The place was definitely a front for something. "Thanks for your time."

"No problem." The large man nodded. "Come back in the daytime. Maybe someone will be able to talk to you then."

"Thanks." Kolchak walked back to his car. Who owned the Royal Tennis Club? That was the next step in his coverage. He had a feeling that he was looking at some gangster place doing illegal things out of view of the public.

Maybe there was a story he could sink his teeth into while waiting for something to move on the Moon murder. That one might remain unsolved if no other clue presented itself.

Kolchak took some pictures of the crowd. They weren't dressed for a night of playing tennis. Maybe there was a locker room with a shower inside.

He decided his next move was to head home and get some sleep. He could start fresh in the morning when he had some way to track down the owner of the club. Tax records should give him something.

He hoped there was something there beyond his suspicions. He really needed a good story.

He wondered how long it would take before Moon's killer struck again.

He doubted it would be long. Monsters couldn't help themselves. They had an agenda, and they liked to kill people. The two things went hand in hand with human criminals.

The only good thing about a monster on a loose was it rarely decided to torture you if you got in the way. That was a lot better than some of the human criminals he had covered.

5

Kolchak adjusted his tie as he listened to the police scanner in his old apartment. It told him that another murder had taken place. He wondered if it was an ordinary murder, or one of his Specials.

He decided it was a following murder to the Moon case. Why had his killer struck again so soon after the first crime? What other kind of crime did he do?

Kolchak headed downstairs to his car. The best way to find out things was to look for yourself. He had to see if this second victim had been sliced into ribbons. If he had, he had met Moon's killer in the dark.

He needed to find out everything he could about the second victim and see if there was a connection to Moon. If he could find one, he might be ahead of the police. That would get his story on the wire that much faster.

Kolchak arrived on the scene. The cops had locked things down in their usual style. How was he going to get pictures? How did he confirm that this was the second victim of the body chopper?

He needed to get a look at the body for himself. Nicholls would blow him off in the name of case details. That wouldn't get him copy for the wire.

He paused when he saw the guards on deck. He had to get around them. The uniforms knew him, and had probably been told to keep him out. He frowned at the thoughts flocking around his head as he looked things over.

He decided to see if there was a door into the building so he could get inside and take a look around for a way to see where the victim had been left. He wished he had something more than Moon's job and address.

Maybe this victim would give him something more to work with and he could start narrowing things down to what he needed to find his monster. Once he had a potential lair, he could start trying to find a way to kill it.

And he would have to kill it. It seemed to be his lot in life to kill things men weren't meant to know.

Kolchak circled the building until he found a door that was open. He frowned at it. He took several pictures of it, then switched film so his pictures of the door was safe before he entered the building. If they took his camera, he still had something he could put on the wire.

He pushed the door out of the way with the sleeve of his coat. Maybe the police could lift prints from it. He didn't want them lifting his. Then he would have to explain what he was doing.

He didn't mind butting heads with the local coppers, but he didn't want to be the prime suspect again.

He made his way through the building. He aimed for the rooms closest to where the alley lined up against the building. Maybe he could get an overhead shot from a window.

He found a window in an office. He frowned when it didn't open. Why did they make windows that didn't open?

Then he remembered they did that to prevent suicides after the stock market crash of the Great Depression.

He had wanted to do the same thing in Vegas after finding out he had to leave. Good thing the windows hadn't opened when he had tried them.

He leaned against the window and looked down. The body was giving the coroner's assistants problems. At one point they put a hand in the bag after scooping it up off the ground.

He shook his head. His monster had struck again. He could tell from the way the hand was pieces of itself.

Now he needed to know who the guy was and what had brought him down to where he could be taken apart by a monster.

Kolchak wanted to know how that could be done. He wanted to know so he could avoid it while getting his story.

Too many close calls had taught him to look for the weakness in the monster before confronting it. His reading hadn't disclosed what could be cutting the victims apart, but he was sure he would find out if he kept looking. Finding the lair meant having an eye on the monster while he tried to figure out how to kill it.

Knowing where it was and what it looked like was better than knowing how to kill it in his opinion. Killing it could come later.

He wondered when he would find a monster he couldn't kill. That would be the end of his career.

Kolchak pursed his lips as he decided what he had to do to move his story along. He needed to know who the victim was, and his background. That had to go out on the next wire.

Maybe he could get something from Gordie. Nicholls would try to stall him so the others covering the beat could get a head start.

He retreated from the office. Whatever had happened, hadn't happened there. The place was too clean. Whatever the Special was doing, he left blood all over the crime scene at Moon's murder with those weird marks in the walls. That pointed away from vampires and other blood drinkers unless he liked to bathe in the stuff first.

That couldn't be discounted. Even human murderers liked to do some strange things when they got into it.

He walked back to his car. He had enough to write a thousand words and post it. He might as well head down to the office and get started. This might be a good scoop.

When the sun came up, he would try to get an identification and see how things fitted together with Moon. They might be two victims of the same stranger. They might have just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. He had no way of knowing until he started looking.

Maybe the club was their common link. It might tie into being a hunting ground for their killer. They walk in and he marks them. Then he asks for a meeting and then out comes the eight foot long steak knife to carve them up.

He tamped down on his excitement as he considered other options that made as much sense as a killer stalking a night club. He had seen it done by other monsters. There was no reason that it couldn't be done by this one. The only question was how did he blend in so no one recognized that he wasn't human.

The next biggest question was how did he kill the thing once he knew what it looked like. He didn't want to have a rakasha moment like he did when he killed a thing impersonating Miss Emily. If it could change its face, he had no way to track it down.

And Tony would try to rein him in if he discussed his theories with him. He would want a human motivation on the killer, and everything that entailed.

Just saying that some guy was a monster who loved chopping people into rings would not hold much clout, especially if the city came down on Tony and told him to keep quiet about it. They wouldn't want to cause a panic. Nothing makes a citizen more panicky than thinking he might be in the crosshairs of something wanting to eat him as compared to a mundane criminal.

You could live with a mobster, or a gangbanger, but not a vampire.

Kolchak pulled up in his parking space in front of the INS building. He went inside and headed up to the old press room. It wouldn't be long before offices like this would be shut down and everything consolidated somewhere like Detroit, or Cleveland. Where would he go when that happened?

He sat down at his typewriter and marshaled the facts. He filled out what he knew about the murder and how it was the second in a row. He put down that he was waiting on an identification so he could provide more facts for the wire service customers. He put the finished copy on Tony's desk.

He still had to write something about the club. How did he go about that when he couldn't interview anyone? He doubted the bouncer was joking about what they did to snoopers. He had no desire to spend a night in jail while trying to talk to someone.

He decided he should go down and look at the tax records for the business. Maybe that would give him something he could use as a starting point for a story. The truth was the truth, even if it was fluff.

He just didn't like writing fluff. He liked digging up secrets and letting people know what the badness was, and that they should fix the problems. More than a few on both sides of the line didn't like that aspect about him.

Dealing with Skorzeny had just brought that side of him out more since now he knew there were more things roaming around than he had ever suspected before he had driven the stake in the old vampire and had been run out of Vegas.

It had cost him everything, and sent Tony to Seattle because he hadn't been allowed to stay either. Then he had cost them their jobs dealing with the Night Strangler. At least they hadn't lost everything in their move to Chicago and INS.

And he had reported on a lot of things going crazy in the Windy City. At least, Tony had been able to edit things down so he was part of the cover-up, and not the loon he had been taken for in Vegas. The fact that he chased down regular stories kept him out of the doghouse.

At least he knew about the things he had put down. He had made things better. And he hated the monsters he had to deal with to reveal the stranger parts of the night. They reminded him of the things he had lost throughout his career that he couldn't get back no matter how hard he tried.

The only thing he had left beside his suit and his mustang was his integrity. He would die before he sold that down the river.

He wondered if that was why he kept at it day after day. Did chasing the truth mean anything? He looked out his window. It meant something because he wanted it to mean something.

He pulled on his hat and jacket. He had to work on the club fluff piece. Maybe chasing down the owner would give him a new angle on his story. Maybe the guy was a bandit in hiding from the cartels.

He smiled at the fanciful thoughts as he headed downstairs. The guy was probably some rich guy who wanted a place for other rich guys to go where they didn't have to deal with people like him who wanted to know everything about them and why they were members of a private club.

What kind of nefarious scheme could be hidden behind a club like that?

He thought of several possibilities on the way to his car. All of them were some kind of extortion. He wondered if that was what was going on at the club.

How did he get in to find out?

6

Kolchak decided that instead of just finding the owner of the tennis court for an interview, he would try to look the guy up and see what else he owned in town. His grin faded at the thought that he might find dozens of places around the world.

He shrugged. He had to do the best he could.

The club was an exclusive playground. He had no way in unless he could forge something for himself. Being a reporter wouldn't help with that. He needed a disguise.

Maybe he could a good suit from a thrift store. His off white suit stood out too much for him to try to get in the front door after being repulsed by the doormen. They would know him on sight, and the suit would confirm his identity.

Too bad it was the only one he owned.

Kolchak decided to start his search at the tax division of the city. Maybe he could get some answers there to point his way for further digging. He didn't really think he would turn up anything more than an expired liquor license, but he wanted to try at least enough to say he had looked into the place.

If he discovered something more print worthy, so much the better for him.

It was a win-win for him however he looked at the situation.

Talking to the people at the Cook County Tax Office had resulted in a name for the owner, time bought, various licenses, and the fact that he had only been in business a few days before the death of Warren Moon.

Things might have gone wrong and they dropped the body away from the club.

The question was what had needed Warren Moon to die. Was there any connection to the death other than his imagination? He needed confirmation one way, or the other.

How did the second guy fit in? Why kill him too? What did he know? There was a ton of questions that needed answers, but he couldn't get into the morgue. Nicholls had the body under guard.

The Royal Tennis Club had been serviced by Moon's company. That was the obvious connection that Kolchak could see.

He tried to dig up a history on the owner, Joseph Morehouse. The man didn't exist before he bought the club. The club owner didn't have any history anywhere that could be reached by phone.

That was another oddity that he could put in his story.

He had to get in the club somehow and figure out what the game was.

How could he do it? The moment he showed his head, he would be thrown out on his ear. The doorstopper said the boss never gave interviews. That put the bar up high for him to get over it.

And what he had was slim. There was no way he could justify the expense of bail for burglarizing the place for a story. Maybe if he could send a major politician down the retirement road, INS might sponsor someone to act as a character assassin to get the job done. If things backfired, he would be on his own.

It wouldn't be the first time a news service had disavowed him.

He decided to take a look at the club again. Maybe there was a way to sneak in that he had missed the first time.

He couldn't write a story if he didn't have any facts to build it on.

Every monster he had ever wrote about had enough supporting evidence to push the story through the wire even with editing to trim the more fantastical things out. No one wanted to say a ghost animated a suit of armor to kill people. They wanted to say someone used it for a disguise to kill those who were plotting to shut down the crazy's favorite museum.

Only Kolchak had seen the thing in action and knew it wasn't just a suit of armor ripping up the city.

He grabbed his tape recorder and camera. Maybe if he couldn't get in, he could report on people arriving and leaving. He needed something for the piece despite thinking that it couldn't just be an innocent place for people to hang out.

He had hunches. Most reporters did. This one was telling him that when he got in to talk to the owner, he would have something to print.

Or he would never report anything again.

Kolchak headed down to his old mustang. He placed his equipment on the passenger floorboard before he got behind the wheel and backed out. He cut off the scanner so he didn't have to hear fire and police rolling to stops. That would distract him from the real job ahead.

He investigated crimes and told the truth. He couldn't let new crimes take precedence over the two he was already investigating. Those crimes would still be there when he was done trying to figuring out how someone could chop a man into rings.

That's the most exotic weapon he had heard of in quite a while. Most of the things he dealt with seemed unconcerned what could help them do the job the fastest.

Their hands and claws seemed to be enough to finish the job.

Except for the Chopper and the Black Knight. They had needed weapons to carry out their rampages.

Kolchak had been glad to end their rampages. Dealing with the Chopper had been a close call. A few seconds slower on the call, and he would have been dead.

Kolchak pulled to a stop down the street from the club. He watched the ins and outs from his car as he tried to think of his approach. He knew he wasn't going to get in through the front door unless he wanted to add assault with a car to his resume of criminal charges.

What did the back look like? Maybe there was a door he could bribe his way through.

He started his car and drove around the block until he could see the back of the club without being seen by the staff. He took a picture of it in case he needed it later. He waited but only one man came out of the back to empty a trashcan into a dumpster.

Kolchak got out of his car and looked around. He was alone. He walked to the back door, looking for other ways in the building without pushing through the kitchen staff.

Did Morehouse have a view of the back of the club? What would he do if he saw a man in a white suit looking around.

He might wind up his chopping machine and turn it loose on the back of the club and render the snooper into rings of himself. That would be the end of a Pulitzer dream.

Kolchak inspected the back silently. He didn't see anything but the kitchen door. That wasn't any help as far as he was concerned.

He inspected the sides. He didn't see any fire escapes. That made sense if the customers were kept on the bottom floor.

The club looked big enough to have a second floor without getting in the way of the kids and mangling them. There should be some kind of ladder on the inside to get up there that high.

What did that leave him?

Kolchak looked at some of the buildings around the club. Some of them were tall enough to let him get in a second way.

All he had to do was get on a roof and look around.

It took a few minutes of searching, but he found a fire escape that let him have access to a roof top. He crossed the roof and looked down on the building opposite. He could jump down on the club if he didn't worry about his knees collapsing and having to call for help.

If he to call for help here, he was as good as dead. Morehouse would rip him apart if he was the Slicer.

If Morehouse wasn't the Slicer, the police would want to know how Kolchak had injured himself and why was he jumping from one building to another one in the middle of the night.

Telling them he was breaking into a club didn't seem the way to go with that.

And letting Morehouse know he was looking into the club didn't seem that smart either.

A man living under a fake name would probably kill to keep that a secret. And the press tended to reveal stuff like that all the time.

Had Moon stumbled over the blank history and said something to Morehouse? That was a good reason to wind up dead. And if Morehouse was a special, that meant he was ruthless enough to do the job himself.

Kolchak gauged the distance. He had to clear the alley and drop a few feet before he hit the gravel on top of the roof of the club. Then he had to look for a way inside without causing trouble.

He backed up to give himself some running room. He sprinted to the edge and jumped from the small rampart around the edge of the roof. He spread his arms as he descended to the other roof. He landed with a light crunch and looked around.

Nothing stood out. It looked like he had made it with minimum fuss.

He walked around the roof, staying away from the edge. He didn't want to be spotted from the ground after jumping over from the other roof. The club's roof was featureless except for some air-conditioning equipment next to the roof door.

No handle on the door.

That wasn't much of a surprise. Fire exits were designed to open out, then close and lock. That kept people from rushing back into the flames if they forgot something like their favorite coffee mug. The door was also probably alarmed so if it was opened, everyone would be able to hear it inside the building and across the neighboring blocks.

Kolchak pulled out a piece of gum and started chewing it as he looked the door over. He might be able to force it if he was lucky. He pulled out his knife and unfolded the blade. It had picked many a door before this. Hopefully, it would help him jimmy this one.

He ran the blade down the edge of the door, slipping it into a crack he found. He pried at it until he was sure he had the tongue of the lock. He pushed back on the bar until the door started to slide open. He pulled the gum out of his mouth and jammed it on the button at the top of the door with all of his strength. He hoped it held before he took his thumb away.

The alarm remained silent. He slipped inside and pulled the door shut behind him. He descended the sudden staircase he was on.

He needed an office with some paperwork, pictures of what went on in the club, and maybe a clue to who Morehouse used to be before reinventing himself as the owner.

Then he could think of some way of getting out of the place that didn't mean he would have to jump off the roof into the alley, or street. He wanted to keep his legs intact as much as possible.

If he got caught, what would Morehouse do to him? Could he bluff his way through a confrontation with the man? Did he want to try?

He decided that he should find the office and see if he could find some kind of financial fraud he could prove. If that failed, then he would look around the club.

7

Kolchak paused when he reached the landing. He listened. He didn't hear anything in the hall beyond the door. Maybe they were all in the lobby of the club.

If he was right about Morehouse, he had to look around quick and get out. He didn't want to be chopped to pieces. Vincenzo would get too much of a thrill out of it.

He moved into the central hall and crept along. He didn't see cameras, so that was a point in his favor. He counted ten doors on either side of the corridor. He listened at them, but didn't hear anything. He frowned with the thought he had to check them but he didn't want to be discovered by anyone inside the rooms.

He made it to the end of the corridor. A door marked maintenance stood last in the corridor. It dared him to find out about mops, or to go home a beaten and broken man.

He opened the door anyway. He had to use a lockpick set, but it had to be done. Maybe some kind of records he could use to anchor any story he might write about the club were inside.

He needed something to justify his suspicion of the owner, and what he might be doing there at the club.

Kolchak paused when he saw what was inside the room. He frowned at the discovery before he shut the door. At least he knew some of what was going on at the Tennis Club, and it wasn't tennis.

A bank of screens showed him what was going on inside some of the rooms in the building. He winced at some of the scenes where people were doing things to other people with straps and hooks on the walls. He noted that slots were in the console for the images to be recorded on tapes for later viewing.

He supposed the guests didn't know they were the stars of their own movies.

He took several pictures of the setup with his own camera. He decided that he might need to take one of the tapes as proof. What he was looking at wasn't illegal on the face of it, but maybe someone would pay not to have this go public.

He looked around the small room and found a cabinet against the wall. He opened it and perused the labels on the tapes inside. He picked two at random and put them in his jacket.

He closed the cabinet and went to the door. He decided to leave. He didn't want to get caught when he had found out what was the secret of the club, and a motive in the deaths of the two men he was investigating. He admitted it was thin that the club was behind the deaths of the men, but blackmail seemed a powerful motive to get rid of someone, even if the method was to slice them into rings.

He had no doubt he was on the right track. He needed to track down Morehouse and ask him some questions about the dead men. Maybe the club owner would twitch enough to point him in the right direction.

He needed solid proof to tie Morehouse to the murders. He also needed a way to deal with the man if he had some kind of ability. Being sliced into rings was not natural by any stretch.

He decided to head to the office when he was clear of the club so he could see what was on the tapes he had taken. He couldn't accuse anybody of anything if what he had was an old movie.

On the other hand, it was valuable if he had caught potentially powerful people doing things people didn't really want exposed.

Was this the motive for the two deaths?

If it wasn't the motive, it was close enough until the real reason showed up.

Now he should go before someone found him snooping around. Usually in a scheme like this, the reporter wound up dead because he knew too much. He didn't want to be fingered for that before he could put things on the wire.

Too many monsters hated him for him to give up simple caution dealing with something he didn't know how to fight yet.

Whatever he was dealing with was something new to him. He had to accept that and try to find a source. Someone would know what this was. Someone had to.

He didn't want to be sliced into rings because he didn't know how to deal with the thing.

Vincenzo would throw a party when he was gone.

And he didn't plan to let his editor be that happy.

Kolchak headed for the roof. He had to get away from the club so he could watch his evidence and see what he had. Then he could do a followup.

He saw a man coming up the stairs as he went up the stairs. Worse, the man saw him. A shouted "Hey!" sped him up to the roof access and out the door.

He headed for the edge of the roof. He had jumped over from another building. He looked around to see if he could do that again. He had to get away from the other man. He didn't want to be caught with the tape in his possession.

He had a feeling he would be the next Slicer victim if he was caught.

He found a building too high for him to jump to its roof. He needed another way off the roof before the other man came out and started looking for him.

Kolchak searched the edge of the roof until he found a possible solution. He lowered himself over the side and pressed against the face of the building. His feet clung to the narrow ledge he had found. Now he needed a way down without killing himself.

The problem was a lack of a fire escape in his opinion. He needed one so he could get down to the ground without being pushed off the building.

Kolchak looked around for an escape route. Any second, the other man would be checking the side of the roof for him. He needed to get off the ledge, and down to the ground.

He spotted a window. He might could get there. Then he could get back inside the building and wait out the emergency. He doubted they would look for him inside their stronghold.

He scuttled sideways until he reached the window. He tried to pull it open. He shook his head when he realized it was locked. He examined the inside of the window as closely as he could in the dark. He couldn't see what kind of locking mechanism it had.

He pulled off his jacket as carefully as he could. He had to lean into the wall to help with his balance. He whipped the jacket around his hand. He used that to hit the glass. It broke out after several awkward tries. He looked up. A light played on the roof. He didn't have a lot of time.

He kicked out the glass in the edge of the frame and entered the room. He breathed a sigh of relief as he went to the door. At least the room was empty as far as he could see from the city light in the window. He tried the door and looked out in the hall. It looked empty. It looked like they hadn't sounded an alarm.

Now all he had to do was get out of there before they figured out what he had done.

He headed toward the elevator doors. He didn't want to take the stairs. The guards would be using them to head to the roof. The elevator doors started to open. He made a split second decision to step into the stairwell to avoid being seen.

He had a feeling he didn't want to run into anybody who might know him. Things would go badly from that point on.

He listened quietly in the stairwell. No one seemed to be using them. He started down as quietly as he could. Once on the ground floor, he could look around for an opening.

There was always an opening to be used to get out of a bad situation. That was the one thing he had learned in his years as a newspaperman. Sometimes you got through, sometimes you were railroaded out of town with your career in shambles.

Kolchak paused at the ground floor door. He closed his eyes and steeled himself for what he had to do next.

He decided not to ask himself how hard could it be to walk across a lobby and out the front door. That would be asking Fate for bad things to happen.

He opened the stairwell door and chanced a look beyond the threshold. No one stood ready to block him leaving. He spotted a back door to his left. He slipped out in the hall, eyeing his right for anyone who might spot him heading to the exit.

He pushed the bar and stepped out in an alley behind the club. He looked up and still saw the flashlight checking things out from the way the beam moved. He headed for the street.

He walked down the sidewalk toward where he had left his Mustang. Once behind the wheel, he could find a place to look at the video he had stolen and think about what to do.

He still didn't know how it tied in with his killer. If the thing provided security, how good was it? Would it come after him? How did he stop it?

He didn't think a stake would do.

The first thing he needed to do was view the tape and write a story based on the contents. Then he could worry about the killer security guard. He needed to check the libraries and see if there were books with this kind of killings in them. That might give him a lead on how to stop the guy before he was stopped.

Maybe there was an expert he could talk to about this. That might clue him in on his killer's methods.

He doubted the police would figure anything out. They were next to useless against some of the strange things that wandered around Chicago. And they never listened despite his many years of letting them know they had to think a lot smarter than what they were used to doing.

A zombie practically ripped them apart and no one wanted to do the hard thing and sew salt in its mouth.

It was hard to be dismissed as a ranting madman when he had faced some of the things he had over the years.

He reached his Mustang and looked around. No one seemed to be interested in him. It looked like a clean getaway. He got behind the wheel and started the engine. He pulled out into traffic and decided to head for the office. There was a video player there he could use to look at his purloined tape.

And his typewriter was nearby so he could type up what the club was all about when he got done looking at the tape.

The only question in his mind was would Vincenzo put it on the wire for the service. He had a history of listening to the publisher about certain stories. He had also bailed his reporters out when they had gotten in over their heads with things.

Tony had gotten him out of Vegas and Seattle after the disasters he had created for his professional life in those two places. He had gotten lucky that nothing he had done in Chicago had warranted a massive response like those first two encounters with the monsters.

Kolchak headed down the streets, thinking about what might be waiting for him before this story was done.

8

Kolchak found the video player in Vincenzo's office. He plugged it in and slid his captured tape in it. He hoped it had some answers for him. What he had seen on the security cameras needed to be backed up by hard evidence.

It might be enough to crash the careers of plenty of people who should know better about taking their fetishes to a place out in the public.

He supposed he had found a blackmail setup investigating the strange murders. He had the idea, but where did the murderer come in? What attracted a monster to something like this?

Was the thing keeping things hidden from the club members? If others were in on the scheme, were they targets too? How did he deal with this? What was it?

He had to find out what it was so he could figure out how to deal with it. He doubted it was human. There was nothing he knew of that could slice a man up like that.

He decided to write up the tape. He already knew too much about what people did to each other for fun. He didn't need to watch any more unless he wanted to identify every player for his article.

He could do that later if push came to shove.

He pulled the tape and put it in an box marked for a television broadcast of Kojack. He took the tape to Mrs. Emily's desk. He taped the box to the underside of her desk top where she wouldn't notice it unless she was on the floor under her desk.

He did that to foil anyone searching his desk for the evidence of their crimes.

That usually happened when he dealt with the human criminal element. They always wanted what he had on them, and the name of his source so they could shut him up. He couldn't do anything about any ransacking, but he refused to give up a source. He had spent time in jail over that.

The judges had not been amused by his stubbornness.

He placed paper in his old typewriter and started typing. He started with everything he had learned about the owner of the club. He presented the murders to one side as contractors killed after getting their jobs done. Then he placed the blackmail tape and the true purpose close to the bottom of the story. At the very bottom, he placed the disclaimer that he couldn't get an interview with the owner to confirm or deny his allegations.

He took the last page of the story from his typewriter. He read over it. He put the finished product in the in box tray on his boss's desk. Tony would want proof of the contents of the story, but as long as he had the tape, he was in the clear on that.

The only problem he foresaw was the inevitable firestorm that would come after his story hit the wire. Someone was bound to come looking for him.

Maybe even the killer.

He needed to find out what the killer was, and how to kill it first. He groaned. That meant chasing old book stores and stacks of library books for the one story that would help him.

He needed an expert on this type of thing. He decided to look for some of his contacts. Some of them might know what the thing was from the murder method.

He climbed into his Mustang. Trying to find his contacts would keep him moving and hard to find by the murderer.

It was a two for one that appealed to him.

As long as he was moving, Vincenzo couldn't track him down either. Eventually he would have to call the office to make sure Tony ran the article. If he didn't, there was no telling what would happen.

He didn't want to be live bait, but Specials didn't stop with one, or two, murders. They stopped when someone stopped them. Too bad he was the man for the job because it was the last thing he wanted to do.

He decided to try to track down Kaz Kazantarkis. The cab driver had helped him a lot with Helen of Troy. Maybe the Greeks had a monster who could do what had been done. Kaz would know.

And Kaz probably knew someone who knew things that he didn't. It was a decent start to his search. And if that didn't help, he knew a couple of museum guys who probably knew something. One had set him up with a shaman so he could deal with the Indian monster stealing and killing across Chicago.

There had to be someone out there who had heard of a monster like this.

He hoped there was someone. He didn't want to have to try to figure out a weakness from what he had seen at the crime scenes. There was no clue there.

He wondered how long he had before the monster started trying to track him down. He figured he had a few days as long as he avoided the INS office. That would force the thing to chase him while he was moving around.

He didn't plan to go easily if the thing caught up to him.

He decided to hit the cab company's office before just trying to drive around and spot Kaz on the road. They would know where he was, and could reach him through their radio system.

If Kaz didn't have a clue, he would try the museum people he knew. Maybe one of them had heard of something like this.

If this was a new thing, he was in trouble.

It was better to have a known myth with some way to get rid of it than a new thing that might be invulnerable to anything he could get to get rid of it.

Kolchak drove his car into the lot of the cab company. He got out, noting that some of the cabbies were bringing their cars in, or getting ready to check them out. How did he want to approach this? He doubted that Kaz's boss would just give him an address to go to if he asked.

He walked into the shop, noting the old but cleaned cars. Maybe he could pose as a cleaning agent. Maybe someone who had lost something in the back of the cab. That happened enough that he could use it for cover.

All he needed was a place to meet Kaz. After that, he would think about how to get ready for the slicer.

"Kolchak?" A short man with too little hair and too much gut came out of the office. "What are you doing here? The police are looking for you."

"Do I know you?" The reporter searched his memory. He couldn't place the face.

"Yeah, you know me." The short man tried to glare face to face at his visitor. He didn't have the height. "You got me fired in New York with your stupid story about Alex Regis."

"Alex Regis?" Kolchak searched his mind for the name. "You're Louie. How did you get fired? I don't remember mentioning you at all."

"Everybody assumed I sent Alex into that fire to die." Louie waved his arms around. "The company people came down to fire me the next day."

"I'm sorry to hear that." Kolchak put on his sympathetic face. He could care less about the office manager. The man had been doing whatever he could to soak his drivers. Kolchak's story had been about one of his drivers rushing into a burning building to save trapped people. The short man had tried to horn in and grab some of the glory. "How are you liking Chicago?"

"It sucks." Louie waved his arms as he tried to decide what was the worst thing he could complain about the windy city. "Stupid train, stupid lake, gangs everywhere, crooked cops. The list goes on and on."

"Chicago does have its own character." Kolchak wondered how he could pry himself from the attention of the office manager. "I see you're running another cab company. What differences is there from the Big Apple?"

"The actual dispatching runs about the same." Louie calmed down as he thought about the job. "The difference is in the licensing and government regulation."

"Tell me more." Kolchak didn't really care, but there might be a column to turn in to Vincenzo, and he had to wait for Kaz to show up any way. He might as well pretend he was doing his job instead of thinking about having to kill the monster that was probably looking for him at that moment.

Kolchak turned on his recorder and let the man talk. He would cut anything that wasn't useful to his story. Then he would turn it in to Vincenzo to see if he could get that on the wire when so many of his more important stories were cut to pieces to keep people from knowing about the things that lived among them.

Kolchak asked questions when he felt the little man running out of steam. That was enough to stir the pot so he could add to his copy. He might get enough to write two, or three, columns out of this.

"Checking in, Lou." Kaz appeared with his bushy hair, and bear-like body. "How's it going, Kolchak?"

"Kaz!" Kolchak cut off the recorder. "I was just interviewing Louie here on the differences between working here and in New York."

"Probably not much." Kaz smiled. His bushy hair had a touch of gray now, but he still had a soft bear body, and twinkling eyes. "What do you want, Kolchak?"

"I need to know if you know any Greek monsters that can slice a man into pieces." Kolchak paused. How many Greek monsters could there be?

"There are plenty that can do that." Kaz smiled. "It comes from being in a Bronze Age setting where swords were the order of the day and most monsters used claws and teeth to do their job."

"You know one that can cut a man into rings like a tomato slicer?" Kolchak might have to consult someone else.

"Not off the top of my head." Kaz shook his head. "This is about those two guys the cops found, isn't it?"

Kolchak nodded.

"There's probably not a Greek connection at all." Kaz looked up to marshal his thoughts. "There's guy at the University of Chicago who might know something. His name's Dylan. They say he has his ears to the ground for anything unusual."

"Dylan?" Kolchak memorized the name instantly. "What's his department?"

"Physics." Kaz smiled. "We were talking and he's really interested in this ghostbusting outfit back east. He says they should be blowing up the city every time they go out and get a ghost."

"Really?" Kolchak's eyebrows went up. "Why?"

"Something about free floating electrons setting off an uncontrolled nuclear reaction." Kaz shrugged. "He would give his eyeteeth for a look at their equipment."

"I can understand that I guess." The reporter let his recorder fall down on its strap. "You think he might have an idea on what's going on?"

"Or he might have a connection that can get you what you're looking for if he doesn't." The cab driver nodded. "Be careful. This sounds a lot more dangerous than a fitness club."

"Helen of Troy wasn't so dangerous when you knew who to call to complain about her." Kolchak smiled. "Take it easy, Kaz."

"Watch your back, Kolchak." The driver shook his head as his friend got in his mustang and drove off.

9

Kolchak pulled in front of the physics building of the University of Chicago. He looked up at the brick building. Was his answer here? Did he have to go somewhere else? How much time did he have left before his problem came looking for him?

He had no doubt he was on a dead line. If his story went out, protecting the club would be the first instinct of his quarry. That meant the monster would come looking for him. He needed a way to kill it first.

Kolchak walked up the stairs. He pushed through the doors. He checked the sign for the office he needed. He headed for the stairs to go up to the next floor.

He inspected the doors as he walked down the hall. He found one with T. D. Dylan on the plaque in the holder in the center of the door. He knocked before he stepped inside. He didn't need to be impolite yet.

"Come in." Dylan shouted. "I'm in here."

Kolchak pushed into the neatest teacher's office he had ever seen. He paused in amazement. The only thing that made the place look like someone used it was the open books with bookmarks in the pages.

"What can I do for you?," said a man with too little gray hair, and too many lines on his face. "You don't look like a student."

"I'm Carl Kolchak for INS." Kolchak paused as he searched for the words he wanted to enlist this guy to his cause. "Kaz said you know things about monsters, and was trying to start a ghostbusting outfit."

"No." Dylan laughed. "I'm trying to get a look at the test diagrams for the Ghostbusters' equipment. Ray Stantz and Egon Spengler are supposed to lecture here some time. I want to vet their equipment before they arrive."

Kolchak frowned. He had heard about the Ghostbusters, but Uptight had covered them for his finance column. They had started out as a steady business, gone bust, restarted, and were going strong again. Maybe he should try for an interview with them.

They were fighting some of the same things he did.

"What do you know about their equipment, Doctor?" Kolchak turned his recorder on. He didn't really need it to help his memory, but sometimes you needed evidence of what you were doing to track things.

"They supposedly have built mobile particle accelerators that shoot subatomic particles at an energy wavelength designed to capture energy beings they call ghosts." Dylan waved a hand at that. "There's no way that can work like they say it can."

"If that was true, what would it do to the field of science?" Kolchak hid his disdain. He had seen too many strange things that experts had dismissed. Usually that got the expert killed instead of doing what Kolchak liked to do when he didn't know what he was facing. You ran when a giant lizard lady came to get her eggs back. That was simple practicality at work.

"Nothing really." Dylan shrugged. "If the beams work as advertised, their applications only matter to the ghostbusting we are talking about. There may be other uses if the beam could be charged with other particles and tuned against solid matter and things we can test against with what we know will happen."

"You could use this as some kind of torch?" Kolchak wondered if that was a viable reason to have some kind of nuclear gun in a backpack.

"Among other things." Dylan nodded.

"You said these Ghostbusters were coming to town?" Kolchak wondered if they would help him with his strange club owner.

"I'm trying to get their equipment vetted for a demonstration right now." Dylan shrugged. "I can't have them blowing up the lecture hall if the things work as good as they say they do."

"Particles slice through anything?" Kolchak wondered how they did against vampires and werewolves. He might need to look into getting one for his own use.

"They tend to set things on fire too." Dylan smiled. "I can't have that. The university board would revoke my tenure if something bad happened because my guests' display went off the rails."

"I can see that." Kolchak tried to think up some more questions that he could use to talk about the paranormal without looking like he was fishing for something specific. Dylan seemed too down to earth to believe anything he hadn't seen with his own eyes. "How did you get into physics and the sciences?"

"I wanted to be able to fly." Dylan smiled. "That's one rule of the world I wanted to violate. I just haven't figured out how to do it without an airplane yet."

"That seems like a lofty goal." Kolchak had wanted to get at the truth and look at what he did for a living. He decided some things should be looked at when you set out to do them.

"It sounds a lot easier when you're eight." Dylan smiled. "And jumping off the roof of your house wasn't dangerous."

The phone rang on his desk. He looked at it. Who could be calling him in the middle of the afternoon?

He picked up the receiver and declared his name. He listened for a moment.

"That's right, Doctor Stantz." Dylan nodded. "I have a partial schematic, and things look good. I just don't want to have problems when you get here. You know how school administrations work. There's a reporter here who might want to sit in on the show in case there is a problem. Kolchak of INS."

He listened, making some notes on a scratchpad. He nodded with a furrowed brow.

"If you want to talk to him, I don't see a problem." Dylan nodded. "Let me give him the phone."

Kolchak took the phone. He wondered what he could ask that didn't make him look like a loon. Maybe he should get into their business practices before asking about ghosts. He finally said, "Kolchak here," to get started.

"Ray Stantz here." The voice on the other end sounded exuberant and eager. "Is this the Carl Kolchak that reported on the thing with the conductor?"

"The doppleganger?" Kolchak searched his memory. There had been so many monsters and ghosts over the years. That one had been an arsonist. He hadn't slept for days over that. Finally he had taken refuge in a church to get a nap before sorting the problem out.

"That's the one." Stantz launched into a lot of technical questions over how he had figured things out. He should have known the ghostbuster would want details about something no one else but the Chicago P.D. cared about because he had burned a crime scene down.

"I have one for you, Dr. Stantz," Kolchak broke in. Dylan sat in his chair smiling. Obviously he had dealt with Stantz before and knew what the reporter had gotten into when he handed over the phone. "Have you heard of a spirit, or monster, that slices his victims up into little rings. I am investigating a case like that now."

"Hold on." Stantz muted the line.

"He put me on hold," said Kolchak. "Are they all like that?"

"I've only talked to Ray and Egon." Dylan smiled. "They seem to know their stuff, but Egon is the more technically minded of the pair. Ray has a couple of degrees but his interest tends to flow into the more esoteric paths of their business. Did you really burn a place down over a ghost?"

"The thing was trying to kill me so it got what it deserved." Kolchak shrugged. "It did kill some other people first, and was trying to kill Ryder Bond when I stumbled on it. It took me a while to figure it out, but after that, all it took was to put it down by putting down where the ghost was made in the first place."

"And the police didn't believe you?" Dylan had that look of sarcasm down pat.

"Trust me, if you get killed in any way that doesn't look normal, they write it off." Kolchak frowned. "They don't write it off, but they don't accept that a guy without a head might want to get his head back even if he has to look some of the old gang up if you know what I mean."

"Are you still there, Mr. Kolchak?" Stantz didn't sound too happy now. "There's nothing in the spirit guide, but Egon said there's a new monster out there. You can't publish about this or they will hunt you down and kill you. Do you understand?"

"Kill me." Kolchak rubbed an eyebrow. What did Stantz think was going to happen if he was wrong. "Go ahead, Dr. Stantz."

"There are escaped humans from Hell. They have powers based on their old lives. They are called the One Thirteen. There's a guy out there hunting them down, but if this is one of his, he might not know about it yet, and we have no way to call him to get you help." Stantz paused. "This is very important. If you think you are dealing with one of these guys, the only way to get rid of them is to destroy their eyes. Do you understand? You have to shoot them, or stab them, in the eyes."

"In the eyes?," Kolchak frowned. This wasn't the first threat sensitive to eye problems that he had met. "Are you sure?"

"Egon said that the one he met had been shot by this Stone and vanished in a stream of fire." Stantz sounded concerned. "We're getting ready to come out there and help you."

"It'll be too late by then." Kolchak didn't have the hours it would take to fly in from New York. This One Thirteen was already aware of him and trying to hunt him down. He could feel it. His sense of things had never failed him before, and he knew it was dead on the money.

"I'm going to hand you back to Dr. Dylan," Kolchak said. "I have to get ready for this guy."

10

Kolchak didn't like the thought that he was the target of something you had to shoot in the eyes to kill. That meant getting up close and personal with something that didn't have any known weaknesses.

Give him a vampire any day of the week.

What was the first thing he had to do to get ready?

He needed a concealable weapon he could use to hit the guy's eyes if Stantz was right. A stake would also be good in case he was dealing with something that was kin to a vampire. Too bad this monster didn't have a marker to tell him what to use on it.

He had a crossbow from killing a rakasha, but nothing he considered dangerous to another monster. He needed to find a way to arm himself so his monster could be surprised.

A shotgun might do the trick of putting out its eyes. He didn't need to be good with it. And sawing the barrels would make it concealable, and illegal to have. He would have to kill this thing fast and then get rid of the weapon.

The police would have field day if they caught him with a shotgun. He would blow a small part of his life defending himself from the charges.

He didn't want to give them the satisfaction of running him out of town. He had worked all over the country. He had built a reputation in Chicago. He didn't want to give that up even if the reputation was that he was a kook and a problem.

He didn't want to rebuild his life after the years he had sweated blood making contacts and learning things about people in the city. He had already done that too many times. He wanted to stick with his crummy apartment, write on his old typewriter, and tell the truth about the city's underbelly. The moment he had to start over, he lost to the establishment telling him he couldn't report the truth.

And he refused to allow that to happen.

He was going to track down this thing and stop it before it stopped him. If that meant a shotgun to the head, and then losing the gun in the lake, he was good with that.

It wouldn't be the first time he sent something back to where it belonged.

The police would not understand the fact he had to blow some innocent looking guy away. They would think he had finally snapped and killed a civilian. And if the guy was spreading money to cover things, some of them would not be happy that their meal ticket had been turned into a copy of the headless horseman.

Kolchak headed for the nearest Sears. A shotgun, shells, and a saw should be within walking distance of each other. He could modify it and then try to figure out how to talk to the club owner about his suspicions.

He thought that he might be able to call to ask for an interview about the blackmail material he had put on the wire.

That should get the guy to agree to be in a place where Kolchak could get rid of him where no one saw what he had done. He didn't want to explain this to the police. They knew him, and they weren't his friends.

Vincenzo was his friend, but he had a hard time with some of the things Kolchak dragged into the air. It had been luck that nothing had caused him to move on again. This might be the case to force him to do that before things were done.

He wasn't going anywhere before he dealt with this thing with the chainsaw hands. Running away just meant the thing would be following him forever. It was better to get rid of the pain as soon as possible.

Kolchak bought the cheapest double-barreled shotgun he could find. He filled out the minimum amount of paperwork that came with the purchase. He bought a box of shells and got one for free. He thanked the clerk for that.

He put the shotgun and shells in a cart and walked around to tools. He talked to a clerk and found a saw he could use to saw the shotgun down. He paid for it with the rest of his cash. He rolled everything out to his car.

Now he had to saw the shotgun down before he could think about arranging a meeting with the owner of the night club. He was sure the guy was a monster in disguise, but he didn't want to shoot the guy and be proven wrong.

Holding an illegal firearm would be enough for the police to jail while they try to figure things out. If the monster blew up, he might be able to get away with murder when they try to prove his victim had existed at all.

He didn't want to give them a chance.

Kolchak pulled out of the lot after stowing the weapon and accessories in the trunk next to his crossbow and arrows. He needed a place to work before he made his next move. He also needed to call Vincenzo to get a reading on what was going on while he was out of sight.

He might have caused the guy to leave the city with what he had thrown out there. Most monsters like to stick to the shadows. He had only run into a few that attacked in the daytime. And to some of those, he was a guy that needed to be killed before they got on with the rest of their business.

Sticking one in the form of a dog until he vanished was justice as far as the reporter was concerned.

Kolchak listened to his scanner as he looked for a payphone. He should at least call Vincenzo and see what had hit the fan so far. The police hadn't turned up another body yet.

He imagined the next one they turned up would be his, sliced into rings with his hat on fire.

He spotted a payphone on the corner of a gas station lot. He pulled into the lot and got out of the Mustang. He checked his pockets for change, smiling when he found a quarter and a dime. That should be okay. He didn't want to stay on the phone long any way.

He put the change into the slot and dialed the office. He wondered what kind of con he might need to try. He needed to divert attention from his writing the story to who was the subject of the story.

He didn't see that gambit being successful.

"Hello?," said Vincenzo. He seemed to be irritated but not angry yet.

"Hi, Tony." Kolchak watched the lot as he talked. "I'm down here looking into one of the victims from the Slicer. I'm hoping to pick up some kind of clue."

"Really?" The mild question usually came before the storm. "I have been reading your piece on that club. You've all but implied that the owner killed those two guys. They want to sue us for everything. What were you thinking?"

"I have the tape they were recording." Kolchak tried to think fast. He didn't want his boss exploding just yet. "If we go to court, I will be able to produce it and match it to the photos I took of the club. Just tell them I have all the proof we need to counter sue and win."

"I need you to come in and bring that tape, Carl." Vincenzo sounded stressed. "Legal wants it so we can answer this suit and knock it down."

"I can't right now, Tony." Kolchak squinted. "I just saw a lead. I have to go."

"Don't hang up!" shouted Vincenzo. "That's an order!"

"See you, Tony." Kolchak smiled as he hung up the phone. He realized where he had to go.

He climbed back into his car. He had looked at everything he could find on the guy. He remembered that his enemy had an apartment near the Loop. He could go down there and see what he could dig up.

Maybe he could catch the great man at home so he could confirm if a blast of gunpowder would fix things between them.

He had no doubt that he could turn something up. He was a master snooper, and snooping always got you something. The problem was most of the time it didn't get you anything useful.

First he needed to arm himself. He didn't want to confront something only vulnerable to having its eyes blown out. Doing something that stupid could only lead to a messy end.

And he had dodged too many messy ends to just walk into one without trying to be a little prepared to get out of it.

Kolchak pulled into a hotel's underground parking and found a spot away from the main entrance. He had to cut the shotgun down for ease of concealment. Then he could go by his subject's apartment.

He got the shotgun and saw out of the trunk. He braced the weapon across the top of his door. He started sawing. He didn't know how long it took, but one barrel came free, then the other. He put the twin pipes on the floor in the back. He pulled out the box of shells and loaded the shotgun. He put a handful in his jacket pocket. The box went back into the trunk.

He put the shortened shotgun in the passenger floorboard. He got behind the wheel and made sure of the address he wanted. He pulled out of the underground deck. He turned and headed to the apartment building.

All he had to do was get inside and look around.

He had spent his career getting into places that no one wanted him to get into. This shouldn't be any different.

Of course, if he was right, then he was facing down a monster in his lair with maybe a clue to what it was. Stantz might be wrong about this. He might be facing something no one had ever heard of before now. They had been discovering new types of fish in the ocean the last few years. He might be in the same boat as far as monsters go.

He didn't like that thought at all. He didn't want to be hunted by something that he couldn't deal with.

If he did get killed, he could count on Tony to cover his funeral expenses. The editor owed him that much at least.

Tony might even spring for a halfway decent obit depending on how much it cost to put his ace reporter down.

Kolchak pulled into a lot across from the Hightower Apartments building. He opened his glove box and pulled out a set of binoculars. He scanned the street, then the building.

The street had a small amount of traffic, some of it going into the apartment building. He noted that only a few of the lights were on. Maybe his guy was asleep, or out.

He had to get pass a security guard on the front desk, ride the elevator up to the proper floor, and make sure the right person got the gun.

Or he could see what the back of the building looked like before he tried to talk his way around the rent-a-cop.

If he couldn't get in the back, he could wait and join someone going into the building in the front.

Using someone as a cover was an old trick he learned as a cub to get into places that wanted to keep people like him out.

Kolchak slipped the sawed-off into his belt. He draped his jacket over the bulge and buttoned it. It would look weird to people who saw him, but he should be okay.

He hurried across the street, veering to an alley leading behind the apartment building. He disappeared into the alley, uncomfortably aware that the victims had been killed in alleys.

He paused inside the alley mouth. He appeared to be alone. He looked around for an entrance on the bottom floor. He didn't see anything except a furled up fire escape.

He jumped up and caught the lowest rung of the ladder. He pulled it down with his weight. He swarmed the rungs, pulling himself up as fast as possible. He found himself facing hallways for rooms through windows on the end of the hall. He tried them until one opened up for him.

He snuck over the threshold of the window. He paused in the hall as he tried to think where to go from there.

He moved down the hall, reading the letters on the door. He thought he might be on the wrong floor. He walked to the end of the hall to the emergency stairs. He opened the door enough to read the number six on the wall. He was on the wrong floor.

He started climbing. The apartment he wanted was on the eight floor. He paused when he reached the right floor to check the hall before stepping out. He didn't want to run into the neighbors while considering breaking into the place.

He also wanted an excuse to explain his presence in case the owner was home.

11

Kolchak looked at the numbers on the doors as he walked the hall. He should be at the right place. He knew better than to chase something in its lair, but he had to be sure before he killed an innocent man.

He had been accused of killing men before. That was what had led him to being exiled from Vegas. He didn't plan to have that happen again if he could help it.

He wondered if he was doing the right thing. Maybe he should call and lure the guy into a meeting somewhere else. He still had the tape as a bargaining chip to lure the monster to such a meeting.

He pushed the door bell with a thumb. He looked up and down the hall. It was too late to run away now. He had to do what he could to prove the resident was a monster. If he was a monster, then the reporter needed to be ready to run away.

The shotgun was for when he couldn't run anymore.

Kolchak listened. Nothing seemed to be moving inside. He frowned. How long was he prepared to wait for his chief suspect? He decided on five minutes before he knocked again.

Maybe the guy was at his club. Coming to his home might have been a mistake.

Should he break in and look around?

The reporter considered the pros and cons of getting into the apartment. He didn't want to have the police do a check and find him rifling drawers.

Getting caught with the shotgun would be bad enough. The police were not his friends. They would use that shotgun to try to get him to shut up about anything he might be working on.

And the special cases he covered made the police look bad indeed.

Kolchak frowned. His instincts said run. His brain said he should try to look around the apartment for more evidence of wrongdoing.

He decided to follow the bad example his brain set.

If he got caught, he would have to try to talk his way out of trouble. It wouldn't be the first time. Cops were more reasonable than monsters.

He paused. Sometimes the monsters were more reasonable.

Kolchak pulled a credit card from his wallet. He jammed the card under the tongue of the lock. He worked the card until the door opened. It was a good thing the deadlock hadn't been thrown.

He looked down at the credit card. He shook his head at the lines scarred across it. It was a good thing it was cut because he couldn't use it now.

He put the card away as he slipped inside the apartment. He flipped on the lights. He closed the door and looked around. He found a painting on the wall, a nice easy chair, and two shelves of books in the main room. He ran his hand over the spines of the books. He paused at one that seemed odd to his fingers.

He pulled the book out of the shelf. He flicked the pages. Photos fell out on the floor. He glanced at the pictures. He grimaced at what he saw. That was more things he would have to take to his grave.

This guy was into torture. If he wasn't a supernatural monster, he was a human one by the things Kolchak had found.

Kolchak wondered what the rest of the apartment looked like.

He looked around. No food and drink in the kitchen, no bed in the bedroom, no toiletries. He had searched a lot of homes. This had the feel of a temporary check-in, and not a living space.

He checked the closet. Clothes hung on the bar in bags.

Kolchak sat down in the chair. Other than the pictures, there was nothing that resembled humanity in this. This reminded him of the first vampire he had encountered.

The place was a cover. The monster pretended he was human, but he still didn't need anything more than the cover.

That fit in with some kind of undead. That fit in with a vampire, and Stantz's escapees. He wouldn't know which was which before he tried to use the shotgun on the man's face.

Causing a monster's eyes to explode wasn't the worst thing he had been forced to do to protect the city.

Of course, if the cops did the job, he wouldn't be in this position.

He heard something in the hall. He locked the door, and ran to the back of the apartment. He pulled out the shotgun. He hoped he wasn't making a mistake.

Kolchak leaned against the wall of the empty bedroom. He listened as the lock of the door turned. The door creaked open.

Did he want to confront the owner, or flee? His instinct said flee. He didn't need to confront this thing in its lair.

The reporter leaned to peek around the corner. He spotted a middle aged man with hardly a chin, and swept back gray hair standing inside the door. A woman stood behind him.

He brought his date home? That wasn't good. Kolchak leaned against the wall. What did he do now? He wasn't ready to kill a woman who might not be a monster.

Morehouse looked completely normal. He smiled as he gestured for the woman to sit in his chair. He said something that made her giggle. He helped her to the chair and stood back.

A tentacle of fire formed around him as he smiled. He could do what he wanted. No one was around to stop him, and no one could in any case.

Kolchak couldn't stifle a gasp. Of course, the murder weapon was some kind of magic.

Morehouse frowned. He looked up from whatever he intended to do to the woman. Was he alone in his apartment?

Kolchak had to do something. If he escaped out the window, there was no telling what would happen to the woman. He could already see another sliced and diced corpse in an alley waiting for the police to find it.

He had to draw Morehouse away somehow.

He had to reveal himself and hope to get away from the monster before it caught up with him.

He didn't like that plan at all.

It was the only one he could come up with in the five seconds he had. How did he survive this stupidity?

He hoped he wasn't making a big mistake.

Kolchak stepped out in the open. He brought up the shotgun. He had used a crossbow before and expected the shotgun to work almost the same. He didn't need to be that accurate with it, and he was braced against the recoil so he could fire again right after the first shot.

The tentacle sliced down before he could pull the trigger. It wrapped around the center of the weapon and sliced through it as it recoiled back to where Morehouse stood. The two pieces came apart in the reporter's hands.

Kolchak kicked the door to the room closed. He couldn't help the woman from where he was. His weapon had been easily taken apart. He had to get out of there before he was sliced to pieces.

The door split in half as he watched. He went to the window. He looked out. The ledge was narrow, but it was there. Newer buildings were being built without them. He had a means to escape. He would have to circle back around and see if he could rescue the woman before she became Morehouse's next victim.

It was a tossup whether Morehouse would kill her first, or give chase. That whip of his gave him a huge reach advantage. And the way it sliced through anything made it uncatchable as far as Kolchak was concerned.

He climbed out on the ledge. He started edging away from the window. He had to make it to the corner and then try to get off the side of the building. He couldn't be caught outside like this.

It would be too easy for him to fall from a push and be passed as a suicide. The police would believe that in a minute before they thought he was murdered.

He had made a lot of enemies covering the crime beat. Some of them wanted to kill him after some of the things he had said about the police department.

He reached the corner and slipped around the edge. The whip sliced the wall next to his head. He jerked away, staggering on the narrow ledge. He fought to be perfectly still and one with the wall. He regained his balance and edged away from the chips being knocked out of the corner as the whip tried to grab some part of him.

He spotted a building coming into view. He was higher than its roof, and across a narrow gap. Could he jump down to it? Did he have a choice?

He looked back at the corner. If Morehouse came after him, he was done out in the open like this. That whip would carve him up faster than a Thankgiving turkey. So he could jump, or try to get to the next corner and hope for something better there.

He pushed off the ledge, falling to the other roof. He hit and rolled some. He had learned to roll on impact from parachuting classes. It had served him well over the years from the impacts he had taken and was still able to run away from whatever was chasing him.

He got to his feet. He needed a way off this roof before Morehouse arrived. Could that whip reach across from the other building? Did he want to find out?

Kolchak ran to the opposite edge of the roof. He found a fire escape. He looked back. Morehouse was almost to the corner. He started down the ladder to the first platform. Then he started down the steps that made up the rest of the metal safety feature.

He reached the bottom landing and looked up. The whip hit the rail next to his arm. It sliced through as it fell up from the contact. He had to get off the fire escape before the slicer found a way to cut the thing away from its supports.

The reporter started down the ladder at the bottom of the fire escape. He dropped down to the alley floor. He had to get away from there.

Morehouse dropped from out of the sky. He landed on the alley floor between his prey and the mouth. The ribbon of flame curled around him with readiness to attack his enemies.

"How's it going?," said Kolchak. He started backing away from the monster.

"Kolchak, isn't it?," said Morehouse. "You've become a thorn in my side. I'm going to pluck you out and discard you in the trash."

"The police will think of you first if you do that," said Kolchak. He backed away, looking for an escape route.

"But they won't be able to prove anything, will they?," said the club owner. His whip lashed out against the concrete alley floor, scoring it.

"It won't matter," said Kolchak. "I already told people about you. Some of them know what you are. They know the guy looking for you."

"I don't believe that," said Morehouse.

"They told me about the One Thirteen and how you're being hunted," said Kolchak.

"The guy is probably on his way to Chicago right now."

"I'll be long gone before Stone arrives," said Morehouse. "In any case, he's not here to protect you now, is he?"

"I don't think you can get clear of this," said Kolchak. "Everyone knows who you are, what you look like. The stuff from the club video is enough to turn the city against you. Stone will probably nail you in two days. Even if you kill me, you won't be around much longer afterwards."

"But it will make me feel better about having to establish myself somewhere else," said Morehouse. "I think it's time to end this. I still have a young lady I will have to let go now, and packing to do."

"You didn't have to kill the other two," said Kolchak. "That's what put me on to you in the first place."

"They knew too much and wanted more than I was willing to pay," said Morehouse. "They had to be eliminated."

And it made perfect sense they would try to blackmail the owner of the new club. They put the security and the cameras in. They probably thought they could cut in and skim some of the profit off. They hadn't known about the escape from Hell and how much that left them vulnerable to murder.

"You can still walk away from this," said Kolchak. "You don't have to kill anyone else. You could start over and do better things."

"What do you think that will get me?," laughed Morehouse. "A shorter stay on my return to Hell if I get caught by the Devil's hound. I think I will pass on that."

"I mean you could reform and try to get into Heaven," said Kolchak. "You could do better than blackmailing politicians and killing people."

"It's what I like to do," said Morehouse. "I also like killing nosy reporters who ruin my assumed identity."

"Who doesn't?," said Kolchak. He tried a door knob for a door on the alley. He pushed on it and slipped through the opening. He slammed the door against the whip. It sliced against the surface, cutting partway through the metal.

Kolchak found himself in a short hall. Two doors presented themselves. He tried one. It was a small bathroom. Cleaning supplies rested on a shelf. He grabbed a can of Glade off the shelf. He pulled out his lighter.

The whip sliced the door again. A section fell out.

He slipped inside the bathroom and closed the door. He made sure the spray was pointed away from his body. What he was about to do was dangerous but he didn't see any other way to get out the mess he was in.

Maybe he would get lucky and Morehouse would pass this door and look through the other one. Then he could sneak away like the rat he was.

He listened. Was that soft footsteps? Did they go beyond the bathroom door? Had they stopped?

Kolchak stepped on top of the toilet. He figured he was to the right of the door. That should give him some room if that whip cut through the door to get to him.

The wood panels exploded into the bathroom. One of the sliced planks bounced off the sink and knocked the mirror to pieces. Morehouse eclipsed the light from outside the bathroom.

That made him the perfect target for Kolchak's desperation move.

Kolchak pressed the button on the Glade. Then he held his lighter out in front of it. He spun the wheel on the lighter. The spray from the can turned into a bit of dragon's breath wrapping around Morehouse's head. The dead man staggered back from the assault.

Go for the eyes, Kolchak. Go for the eyes.

He knew he was going to regret doing what he was thinking.

He pulled a pen from his pocket and sprinted forward. He stabbed one eye in the melting face with it. A stream of fire burst from the eye. He had to leave the pen sticking out of the skull.

He pulled off his belt and used the prong to puncture the other eye. He left the belt hanging to back up from the heat.

Morehouse vanished in a stream of fire that ran out of energy almost instantly. His screams cut off with his disappearing.

Kolchak looked down at the burns on his hands, ash on his suit, and sat down on the toilet. Vincenzo was never going to believe this.


End file.
